Carmina Romana

Versified inscriptions from the city of Rome date from the Republican period through to late antiquity. An edition of the city of Rome meeting modern standards has yet to be produced. The contributions provide individual analyses of linguistic and content-related aspects of the texts and media relating to verse inscriptions from the city of Rome. In addition, some contributions address methodological issues such as social groups or modes of presentation, or that explore the prospects of digital resources, particularly for a city characterised by multiculturalism and multilingualism such as Rome. Not unlike the rest of the empire, funerary inscriptions in verse dominated in Rome; since Late Antiquity, however, other types of text have evidently become increasingly popular. In the Republic and Late Antiquity, such inscribed poems, with or without a prose framework, were more of an elite phenomenon, whereas epigrams in the Imperial period were a popular text type for broad sections of the population. In addition to analysing various aspects of textual developments over the centuries in Rome, the volume offers an edition of 40 carmina from Rome, which constitute a small part of the material Bengt E. Thomasson (1926–2025) had prepared in anticipation of a planned CIL volume.